


Day 5779, 8 AM

by Maldoror_Chant



Series: Diplomatic Relations [7]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Adopted Children, M/M, OC POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 23:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13798632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maldoror_Chant/pseuds/Maldoror_Chant
Summary: A final epilogue to the Diplomatic Relations series, some fifteen years after the events in Kindred.





	Day 5779, 8 AM

Day 5,779, 8 AM

 

“Hey, Kichiro!”

Chiro didn’t look up as he made the second incision over the abdomen. “Just a sec.”

“Okay, but hurry, man.”

“Nilum, I am about to dissect a liver. That’s not something I hurry,” Chiro grumbled.

“We just saw your dad in the quad. He’ll be looking for you.”

Chiro paused, scalpel poised over the cadaver. “Lee? I didn’t think you knew him.”

“Sure I do, man, he took me, Rose, Kasu and the others out for lunch that one time. I never forget a guy who feeds me as much steak as I can eat.”

Oh yes. Lee had enthusiastically invited what felt like half of Chiro’s class out for a huge meal at his expense once, but since that was at the start of the year when he’d helped Chiro move into his new rooms, and they were now approaching the end of the second term, that was still a remarkable feat of memory. Or so Chiro thought, until he realized Nilum and Salina were both sporting large grins. 

“We’ve seen you two hanging out together too, he visits you a lot, and...” Nilum rolled his eyes deliberately, drawing out the silence like the amateur class clown he was. “Aaaaand the eyebrows, man. The eyebrows. They run in the family.”

“Yes, they do.” Even Aki’s had filled out when he’d hit puberty, though they looked better on him in Kichiro’s opinion. “Thanks for telling me.” He straightened the diagram clipped to the edge of the stainless steel table’s rim and brought the scalpel to bear again.

“Aren’t you going to go say hi? Don’t he live an hour away?”

“He’ll know I’m busy, he’ll wait.” Lee was always hyper aware that his son was a ‘very industrious medical researcher in training’, and when he dropped by unannounced, would usually start by apologizing ten times for interrupting before letting Chiro drag him out to the local diner. 

“Chiro.”

“Hm?”

Rose, Chiro’s lab partner, wet a cloth and put it over the incision. “Go. We can do this later. I’ll put the body back in the morgue.”

Chiro hesitated, glancing at the clock at the entrance to the large dissection room. “No, we don’t have to, he’ll wait.”

“Maybe he will, or maybe he won’t have the time,” Rose said quietly. She was a quiet girl with an exceptionally deep voice that made Chiro think of rosewood oboes when he was being fanciful - which was more and more the longer he knew her. “Last time he dropped by, he could only stay an hour.”

Good point. “That was just the one time. But...if you don’t mind?” His latex gloves were already halfway off. It’d been over a month since he’d seen Lee. Which was rare. The university town of Eddindare was only a long day of travel away from Sunagakure - a day for Chiro, which was only an hour for Lee. The Jounin normally dropped by each time a mission took him anywhere near this part of the world, and sometimes just because he had a free day and wanted to make sure his boy wasn’t working too hard, was eating right and getting enough exercise. But Lee had been so busy with those missions in Stone country that he hadn’t stopped by for ages. Chiro himself went home every few weeks, but had missed his foster dad last time. 

“We saw him near the café just as we were coming here,” Nilum offered. “If I’d known where you were, I’d have gone over and told him.” He waved and headed towards his own lab bench. Salina, whose partner hadn’t yet shown up, lagged behind. Chiro caught her stare and lifted his chin interrogatively.

“The eyes too, huh?” she said, amused. “They’re also a family thing?”

“Yeah yeah,” Chiro muttered. His eyes weren’t that unusual, really, but a weakness in reaction to the raw sun that had bathed his childhood had forced him to wear glasses when he’d turned twelve; they accentuated the roundness which he thought of as the Lee Effect. 

He could have had his eyesight corrected. If he’d gone on to become a Shinobi, he would have had this corrected out of necessity. But Chiro had decided to go his own path, in this and many things. He did not want to become a fighter or a killer. At twenty, Chiro knew where his niche was; in academe, where he would one day invent and develop new medical treatments for both Shinobi and the general populace. A job that would save lives at a remove, that would allow him to build himself a wall of knowledge and tasks and research around him - it was a job that pretty much required glasses as a prerequisite, over which to one day look at rowdy twenty year old students who would refuse to listen.

Lee and Aki had not understood his choice. Oh, they’d been behind it one hundred and ten percent, but they’d not understood it. He still had their wholehearted support. He had his entire family’s support, including the support that mattered the most, the one person who did understand that, for Chiro, safety and stability did not come naturally but had to be constructed brick by brick, like the solid walls of this famous university and research center in Wind country.

Chiro trotted out to the quad, looking for a familiar green-clad figure. Lee was supposed to visit him incognito for reasons of safety and discretion, but had never quite grasped the mechanics of going around looking low-key other than taking off his Leaf Jounin insignia and vest. Fortunately Eddindare was very metropolitan and attracted all types, even Lee didn’t get noticed too badly. 

At this time of day, the quad was heaving with people, which Chiro had forgotten to factor into account. How was he going to find Lee in this press? Just as he made up his mind to go back to the lab and hope they could catch up later, Oss, Salina’s lab partner, wandered over with a bunch of coffee cups in a holder.

“Hey, Kichiro, you lookin’ for your dad? He took off a minute ago that way.”

The direction of the dorm, of course; at this time of day, Chiro was reliably there if not in the lab or the library. “Thanks!” 

He sped down the street. Students streamed by, but Chiro’s height gave him an advantage. He almost missed Lee anyway, as the figure he was searching for was past the turnoff leading to the university student housing block. Fortunately Chiro caught a slice of profile reflected from a bookstore window: familiar shoulders, familiar black hair caught in the collar of a nondescript vest, and the flash of familiar eyebrows in the profile. Chiro jogged towards him, making his way at counter-current to the student flow. “Hey! Dad!”

The figure tensed and spun around.

Wow, must have been a rough mission, Chiro thought horrified, because that was the first reason that came to mind to see Lee’s face so changed-

It wasn’t Lee.

Chiro stumbled to a stop fifteen feet away.

He stared at the stranger _(not a stranger)._

The man stared back.

Moments ticked by. 

Chiro stood there, agape. Unmoving. One hand stuck out in an abortive ‘hi’ motion, the other grasping a small lump on a string beneath his tee and labcoat, a shaped piece of sand he’d had around his neck for over fifteen years.

Two students walked through the fifteen feet of space between them, arguing about something.

The man in the street glanced at them, then back at Chiro briefly. Then vanished.

“What the hell?!”

Chiro jumped and spun around. 

Nilum, Oss and Salina were coming up behind him. They must have followed Chiro to come say hi, and hopefully cage a late breakfast off a visiting parent with well-known generous tendencies, a time honored university tradition. 

“Where’d he- how’d he-“

“Your father’s a shinobi?” Salina asked, startled, staring at Chiro.

“That wasn’t my father,” said someone somewhere a little bit to Chiro’s left. (He did recognize his own voice after a couple of seconds.)

Oss and Salina swiveled to look askance at Nilum - who’d been the only one to actually meet Lee at the start of the year. 

“Really?” Nilum gaped. “But I’ve seen him at- I mean- I’m not that good with faces, but c’mon, who else looks like that? Uh, dude, sorry-“

“You need to return to the university,” Chiro said, walking by them quickly.

“What? Why?”

“ _Now._ ”

Chiro didn’t look back to verify that they obeyed him. He knew they would. He knew they’d be wondering at that tone coming from the bespectacled nerd they thought they knew for the rest of the school year.

Chiro broke into a run. Then he bullied his body into producing chakra, which he really should be practicing more. 

Eddindare had a small garrison near the quad to watch over the school. It had once been manned by city guards and one or two low level Sand Shinobi on contract to the local authorities, as the university had a few old tomes and jutsu scrolls which they studied. The security had been discreetly beefed up two years ago when Chiro had started his pre-residency year. Though they were still dressed as city guards, the entire contingent of six were now Suna Shinobi. Chiro had only been there a couple of times, he rarely had cause to go. He burst through the gate to the small courtyard, startling the Chuunin on guard duty. 

“Hey, who- Oh, Rock-san, sorry, I didn’t-”

“Need to talk to commander Amar,” Chiro said, voice dull and clipped.

“Is there a problem?”

Chiro brushed right past him. “Commander?”

Commander Amar’s office was on the second story of the small building, and he usually had his window open in the warm dry climate of Eddindare. Fortunately he was at his desk. Chiro saw him stand up and lean out the window. 

“Chiro-kun? What’s the matter?”

“Sir.” Chiro’s arms were at his belt which no longer bore kunai. It’d been ten years since he’d left the Academy but somehow it came back naturally. “There is a Shinobi from Mist undercover in Eddindare. I ran into him just now. Near Satto street. He took off. Heading to the gate. He knows I made him.”

A small child inside Chiro listened to the report with belated consternation. He’d just...he had just betrayed (no, not betrayed, it was my duty) he had just (done what I needed to do) he - ( to insure my safety and that of my fellow students-) it was done now anyway (not that he had looked hostile- why was he near the quad? Did he even know I was in this city? Was he really looking for me or was it just a coincidence?) It was done.

He had just given up Rock Katsuro to the Shinobi of Sand.

He had done his duty. Rock Kichiro’s loyalties were to Konoha, to Suna and to his family, and Rock Katsuro was an enemy of all three. As well as other things that were too large and fragmented to fit into Chiro’s mind at present. 

Their very absence left Chiro feeling hollow inside. Like a bamboo pipe reverberating under shock.

Amar made three sharp gestures to a woman who’d poked her head out of the next office over - a Jounin, Chiro could feel it from her chakra levels. The woman vanished.

“Please come into my office, Chiro-kun,” Amar said steadily. 

“Yes sir.”

\---

 

An hour and a half later, Chiro was back in front of the corpse. 

Other students had gathered in the dissection room by then. End of term was coming up, they all had papers to work on. Chiro would have preferred to do his work earlier, when the place was quieter. Before the stability of his world had shattered. 

Rose had been reading a book when he came in. Her welcoming smile had slipped as their eyes met. But she had not asked any questions, just marked her page and gone to get their assigned cadaver again. 

Chiro had been staring at it for ten minutes now.

“Hey, sorry man.” 

Chiro tensed and looked around. Crap. Nilum. Chiro didn’t mind seeing his friend ordinarily. Just...not now. 

“You okay?” Nilum asked, hands stuffed in his pocket. His face had lost his usual droll seen-it-all attitude, he looked his age for once. “Um, the guards were asking me all kinds of questions. Apparently that was some dangerous guy we saw? Sorry I sent you right out there, I seriously thought-“

“It’s okay, you couldn’t know. No harm done, he wasn’t...”

Chiro dried up before he could say, ‘he wasn’t here for me’.

It had only taken him a minute to bring Amar up to speed with the very, very little he knew. Amar had insisted Chiro stay in his office under guard for the hour that followed, until they’d determined that Katsuro was no longer anywhere in the vicinity, and had probably fled Eddindare. Chiro had complied. Actually he’d sat there like a pigeon who’d just flown smack dab into a window and was too stunned to move. Too many questions had swamped him. The ones thundering through his head, and all the questions he should have hurled at that man in the street.

There had been so many ways he could have reacted. So many ways he _should_ have reacted. Instead he’d just stood there like a stump. Of course, even now, a whole hour and a half later he still couldn’t say how he should have reacted, optimally. Attacked Katsuro? That’s what Aki would have done, and he’d have a good chance at taking him down, the overachieving on-the-Jounin-fast-track brat. Chiro wouldn’t get the first swing in before being very dead (would he be dead? Would Katsuro-)

He’d just stood there - he hadn’t even _said_ anything. He hadn’t even asked a single question...

Questions. Questions had grown like a canker on his soul when he’d first come to Sunagakure, but they had also buffered him against the rawness of the world, they’d been his shield and his weapon and the armor that isolated him like a thin crust of sand of his own. Their eventual answers had been the bridge spun out of nothingness that had finally led him out of the bad place, the deep inner place. But there’d been questions he had never had an answer to. That the man he had just seen was the only person in the world to be able to answer.

Not that he would have answered. Probably. Would Chiro be able to believe anything he said anyway?

Chiro had just stood there, mute...

“Hey.”

He looked up. Realized he’d been dumbly sitting at the dissection table pretty much like he’d been back in Amar’s office, one finger trailing uselessly on the anatomy chart, the other hand grasping his pendant so hard it was probably ruining the lines of his tee-shirt with permanent stretch marks. 

“Oh, Rose! I-...sorry, I’m not super focused today.”

Rose just looked at him steadily for a few seconds and then asked, “Did I understand right? The man you saw out there wasn’t your father?”

Words died on Chiro’s tongue and so he just shook his head instead. Rose didn’t know anything about Chiro’s history. Only the half dozen Sand Shinobi and a well chosen university counselor had any knowledge of Chiro’s past.

Rose nodded as if she understood something from his silence anyway. 

“Okay.” Chiro called his attention to order and picked up the scalpel. And immediately put it down again. “Oh boy. No way.”

“What?” Rose looked at him, startled. 

Chiro got to his feet, giving the clock above the lab a disbelieving look. “No way- it’s not been much over one hour, how did he get here so fast?”

Nilum at the next table glanced at him curiously. Nilum’s partner, Matei, was staring at the door out of the lab and his face was white. Matei was a one-time Shinobi in training, like Chiro had been.

“Um-“ Chiro glanced over his shoulder at the bodyguard that Amar had stationed in the room, discreetly dressed as usual in an Eddindare guard uniform. The Jounin, who’d been staying out of sight of the civilians, took a step forward with a faintly resigned look on her face. 

“Did you warn him?” Chiro asked quietly.

“The commander sent a message, but it can’t have reached Suna more than thirty minutes ago. I don’t know how he got here so fast.”

“What are guys on about?” Nilum asked from over at his table. 

The double doors of the place blew open with a rather impressive _wham_.

“Oh boy,” Chiro muttered again (long acquaintance with Lee had battled successfully against the crude vernacular that students his age usually picked up). 

“Hey-“ One of the TAs moved to intercept the figure marching through the long room- then the man, untrained and ignorant civilian though he was, let instinct take over and dodged out of Gaara’s way.

Chiro stripped off his gloves again and took a step forward, catching Gaara’s attention across the room. Though Gaara had know he was here, had come straight here by the looks of it.

“Kazekage-sama,” the Jounin murmured. Gaara walked right past her and grabbed Chiro by the upper arms.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m completely fine,” Chiro said, grinning. And he was. There was a well remembered feeling of prickly static in the air. A random spark jumped from a faucet to a student’s hand one table over. For those sensitive to chakra, the air rumbled and roiled with a smell of copper and ozone. It would be unsettling to some - Matei looked like he was about to throw up - but Chiro? His world was suddenly solid again.

Gaara gave him a drill-like stare - also familiar - and then seemed to relax a fraction.

“How did you get here so fast? Why are you even here, you can’t have gotten the message yet,” Chiro asked curiously.

The green on green eyes flickered towards the Jounin. “You sent me a message.” It was both question and affirmation. Which meant Gaara had passed the messenger bird on the way over and didn’t even know what was wrong, though he now knew something was up. 

“Yes, sir,” the Jounin answered respectfully.

The mark on Gaara’s brow had faded a little in the past few years. It wrinkled to barely readable as he frowned. “I felt something was wrong. I did not know what.”

“That’s pretty impressive intuition,” Chiro said. “Though I wasn’t in any danger.” He didn’t think, He wasn’t sure. Probably not. But he couldn’t be sure and he hadn’t asked any questions.

Gaara would not blame him for not asking questions or attacking. Gaara would have wanted him to do exactly what he’d done: stay safe, warn the garrison, not get hurt, and not do anything that could rip up the foundations of the stable world that Gaara had helped Chiro build for himself over the past fifteen years. In Gaara’s world, defending what was precious was more important than answers, infinitely more important than revenge.

One of the hands still clasped his upper arm. Even now, Gaara rarely touched people other than those in his most immediate circle. Chiro reached up and squeezed the tense fingers. He could feel chakra roil around them. Everybody around the large room was staring, even though most of them were not Shinobi and would not know why the intense man dressed in red and black with the gourd on his back was holding all their attention, and making them feel jittery. Chiro, amused, made a bet with himself. He’d shot up to Lee’s height these past four years, he was now a bit taller than Gaara, eyes almost at a level with the hair that’d grown less blood-crimson and more dusty-red over the years. Chiro could ask the opinion of everybody else present as soon as Gaara had left, and they would all tell him with complete certainty that the other man had definitely been taller than he was. It was just one of those things...

Gaara gave him one more once-over, eyes unblinking in the pool of the black marks around them. Like the scar on his forehead, they had also changed in the intervening years, crowsfeet invading the corners, a few wrinkles from the sun, the burdens of office, from concern in the immediate. Finally the hand gave Chiro a pat and left his arm. Gaara glanced down without much curiosity at the corpse behind Chiro, then at the Jounin, who nodded faintly, unspoken words about Chiro’s safety exchanged with one look. 

“I need to go talk with Amar,” Gaara stated. 

“I’ll stay here,” Chiro said, answering the question that had not been asked but had hung there anyway. “I- Rose and I- this is Rose, my lab partner. And my friend. We need to get this done, it’s for our end term.” We’re safe here, was what he was saying in the subtext, and I need to do this.

Gaara understood deadlines and obligations and getting one’s life back on track. He nodded once - at Chiro, not at Rose, over two decades as Kazekage had not gotten him much better at social niceties. 

“I’ll be done by lunchtime, I’ll come find you then. We can eat together. We can talk,” said Chiro softly, once more building that bridge across the chasm. 

Gaara turned without any other form of ceremony, making his way to the double door where a Chuunin and Amar had appeared and were politely waiting for him.

Whispers surged up as he left. 

“That’s Gaara of the Sand.” Chiro heard hissed from the lab table at his left, a couple of students from Wind Country’s capital. 

Wow. Chiro hadn’t heard that in awhile. Not those words. Not in that tone. Those words were imprinted onto his childhood in the same way old training scars from his Academy days were, in the same way his naturally fair skin still bore traces of deep tan. Yet said like that now, years later, knowing the man behind it as well as he knew anyone...it sounded foreign. It sounded wrong. It sounded like a monster. Chiro was an adult now, he knew there was no such thing as monsters. There were just men. Some were trying to redeem the sins of their past, others had never found the way to, or had never tried.

Chiro sighed internally and shook himself. So much for not standing out. He’d made it almost two years at a day’s trip from Sunagakure without anyone knowing who he was related to, that was already pretty amazing. This revelation might make things a bit uncomfortable, a bit different, a bit complicated. Chiro didn’t care all that much, certainly less than he did when he’d gotten out of bed this morning. It didn’t seem that important anymore. 

“That was intense.” Nilum had, once again, wandered over (Matei was still standing ten feet away, gripping the edge of the dissection table). “Uh, dude? Was that Gaara of the Sand?”

Chiro looked at Rose, addressing her even as he answered the question.

“No, _that_ was my father. Come on, let’s get this started. I think my afternoon is going to be very busy. And I want to take you to lunch with us if you don’t mind, get to meet him when he’s a bit less-...uh, actually he’s mostly always like that, but you get used to it.”

Rose nodded and picked up her own scalpel.

**Author's Note:**

> I write for a hobby and a lot in my professional life as well, and should be good with words as a result, but I can't even begin to express how grateful I am for all the kind enthusiastic comments I have received over the years for this entire series. They made the entire enterprise worthwhile, and also helped through some of life's ups and downs. This little epilogue was conceived years ago, but never put into writing until now. Consider it a thank you for the people who have followed this series from the start and wanted to know 'what happens next!' 
> 
> Thank you for reading.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Day 5779, 8 AM [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16149521) by [Opalsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalsong/pseuds/Opalsong)




End file.
